A. Van Jordan

A. Van Jordan was born in 1965 in Akron, Ohio. He is a graduate of Wittenburg University, Howard University, and the Warren Wilson College MFA Program. His poems have appeared in Callaloo, Crab Orchard Review, Ploughshares, Seneca Review, and elsewhere. He is the author of Rise (Tia Chucha, 2001), winner of the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Award, and M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A (W.W. Norton, 2004), a cycle of poems about the life of the first African American teenager to advance, in 1936, to the finals of the National Spelling Bee. Jordan is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award, among other honors. He has taught at the College of New Rochelle and is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Texas, Austin.

Beggar’s Song

I don’t remember the last time

I was touched.

In a dream, a tongue—

Or, just breath—

Outlined my navel

With flute music

And I curled up,

Rolled to an empty beach,

Burrowed into wet sand.

When I woke,

My life was full of contradiction.

I trusted no one    not

The one who loved me    not

The ground that held me    not

The sky that caressed my cowling back.

My only fear is love;

I have a defense against all others.

My only friend is my skin;

I send letters to myself.

If I could dream now,

A dark woman would obsess

Over my hands.

She would stalk

Through brush and trees and other earth

To corner me on my back,

Stab me with her tongue,

Dance with all the forbidden steps

That my heart kept secret.

In my life, I’ve hid from everything above my head.

I knew my life was empty, yet I lived long.

We all come from dust. I rub my belly to the ground.

Every man has a song. I like guitars; they’re full of emotion.

We all must die,

But in my death, let me live.

Take my husk and make a charango.

Open me up and throw away my armor.

Let blood and tears mingle with music.

Let my naked body be a mirror to the world.

Smell what lack of love does to the flesh.

Kind of Blue

How I tried to explain

the love I heard between

the notes, how I reached

for you when he played,

how when a man’s heart splits open

in the middle of a song—

whether playing or just connecting—

it is not unlike a gasp

for air, at the close of sex,

at that moment, how wondrous

our faces seem when we hear

a soul speak through a horn,

how perfect the grammar

between the notes.

And it was not because I knew

I would leave you years later,

in D.C.—once I found you

in bed with another man—

that I took you downtown

to see Miles Davis in concert

at Cincinnati’s Music Hall;

it was just because you could leave me

and I knew—even then when I knew

nothing, when I had just bought

my first Miles Davis album—

I knew that good memories haunt us

as much as the bad ones.

And that night in ’85

I think it was because I loved

him that you hated Miles Davis.

Oh, you wore that short skirt—

your legs pouring out

like two high Cs from a trumpet’s bell—

but you still had an attitude.

You said he was a heroin addict,

a junkie, that his skin stretched

like leather because of drugs.

And I was reminded

of my neighbor who was on crack

and the night he came to beg for some money,

this guy who had a wife and two kids,

I asked him why he got high,

as if it were my business.

With his head turned from me he said,

Man, it’s like you’re havin’ sex

and you come and you just keep

comin’ and comin’, 15 to 20 minutes straight.

And then he looked at me and asked

Have you ever known love like that?

I gave him five dollars that night.

And despite your rolling eyes,

and the Tsssst you made with your teeth,

I bought you a ticket to the concert.

Remember how we sat on the front row

and how, in the middle of the first set,

Miles walked across the stage

on that tightrope invisible

to all but him, how he stopped at its edge,

and how he played “Time After Time”

and broke it down to you

and stared first at your legs

and then straight into your eyes.

I wasn’t jealous, you see,

because he made my point for me.

And to this day, because of that night,

I know for certain

that you still love one of us.

And look at you now, years later,

getting high in your apartment,

your stereo spinning a Miles Davis disc.

You no longer question

what kind of blue pulls a man’s skin

so tightly over the face.

Yes. What do the uninitiated, who can only listen,

know about this kind of love?

Public Radio Plays Eddie Harris

Clouds stand in protest of morning.

I wonder should I cross this picket-line sky and go to work.

The 70 bus stood me up for our 8:32am date.

Headlines say I voted for a man who cheated on his wife.

By 2:00pm my body’s at war with a virus.

I am now blue fire.

My throat is lined with cactus.

There was no mention of this in the morning paper.

I crawl back home to my room; my bedsheets are cold.

At 10:00pm a call of bad news from my family:

Something about a car and my brother.

Doctors say he may never dance again.

This chord of bad news accompanies today’s riff.

Folks have gone on strike in heaven.

Sweat pours off the shoulders of the night.

No need for liquids and drugs, I’m already dead.

If WPFW FM can’t resurrect me, Lazarus was a liar.

Thank God, they’re playing Eddie Harris.

I have friends who are atheists.

I have ammunition for our next argument:

They play four Eddie Harris tunes in a row!

Faith healers are tuning in.

I’m all but cured when they make the announcement:

Eddie Harris died today.

Thoughts tornado over my bed.

It pirouettes over the city with hips like my mama’s.

Eddie always said there’s no such thing as a wrong note,

Only bad connections to the next.

I put the alarm clock under the sheets.

In the morning it will sound like music.